not falling behind or running late
by strexcorp
Summary: Penny doesn't understand the Island as much as how it hurts people. (Desmond/Penny, with some background Kate/Claire.)


did you miss me? or remember me? didn't think so. but hey, it's me, back with some lost-related content.

—

Penny's had him back for not even twenty four hours when he says he's tired and going to get some rest. Which is understandable, she knows, but she still has no idea what happened to him, and she needs to, she needs to.

But she tells him he's free to, because he is, and she goes back to worrying.

The younger American man- Hurley?, approaches her only a few seconds later, says "He'll be back in, like, an hour and a half."

"He isn't really the power-napping type, from what I recall."  
"He kind of… has to, dude. The Hatch kinda made him."

"Hatch?"  
"Oh. Um," and with that he leaves.

She's done her research. She knows about the Island, she knows about the people that live there now, the people that lived there before. She tries to connect the dots.

She doesn't.

—

The microwave goes off for Sun's ramen (they drew straws for who got to eat first) and Penny sees her boyfriend's hands tense up immediately. Sayid nods at him, and Desmond shakes his head in response.

"You alright, love?" she asks, reaching out for his hand.  
"Fine," he says, quiet. "I'm perfect."

She pulls him aside later and asks why the microwave bothered him, because it seems like the right thing to do.

"I just… don't like beeping noises too much." He looks nervous, combing his hair (so long, so tangled,) with his fingers mindlessly.  
"Can I ask why?"  
"You wouldn't belie-"  
"There's not much I wouldn't believe, at this point, Des, don't patronize me."

"I'm not trying to patronize you."

So he explains the past three years, finishes it off with "and then Jack and Kate and Locke found me and I went with them. The end," which is a neat and tidy bow on a utterly horrifying story. (There's more to it than that, she knows, but she'll wait.)

—

He'll space out completely on occasion, and then run up, urgently, to Hurley or Sayid (clearly the two he was closest to) and warn them about something. This, she's seen before. Hurley always nods, Sayid always touches his own lips, pensive. Hurley makes jokes about Desmond's psychic powers, but they don't seem like jokes.

"I think," Desmond says to her, when Kate comes down the steps holding the baby that apparently belonged to a girl named Claire, "That Kate's going to say she's going to raise Aaron as her own. That might be tomorrow or the next day, though."  
"She tell you?"  
"Nah. Just a hunch."

And his hunch is right.

So her boyfriend might be able to see the future. This is, somehow, among the least sci-fi of everything she's heard this week.

—

He tells her more about everything within the next few months. Years. He's slow to divulge, but that makes sense.

He killed someone.

He crashed a plane.

"Your letter saved my life," he says.

"Your letters saved mine," she says.

(He had written about her and how she was the one thing he'd never regret, paragraphs upon paragraphs about her kindness and her intelligence and just _her_. He wrote down excerpts from whatever book he was reading. Illustrations. Apologies. And it kept her going, through her research, kept her going through those three years.)

Things are almost normal, for a little. They're a happy little family of, well, now, three who happens to live on a boat. That's not unheard of. And then he wakes up, having seen not the future but the past.

That's when life goes back to hell.

"Fucking… jewelry shop woman," he says the first night when they're back in Los Angeles, and she shushes him, because Charlie is awake and playing with his twenty dollar toy keyboard, which he is rather obsessed with. She considers, perhaps, getting him lessons, and dismisses that entirely as Desmond continues, "The woman who told me to leave you. Years and years ago. That's Daniel Faraday's mother. That's Eloise Hawking."

"Eloise Hawking?"

"Her name."  
"Clearly. Rings a bell."

"She's rich and English. Probably you've met her?"

"Maybe," she pauses. "Unrelated, but can you grab groceries tomorrow?"

"Absolutely," he says, kisses her forehead, "Meanwhile, our good friends Jack and Sun are on their way to the island."

"You're kidding."

"Wish I was. They're not gonna go through it, I don't think. Why they would..," he laughs, runs his hand through his hair.

She smiles. Despite the others, they are going to be fine.

—

They're not.

She runs into her father when she goes out to get Charlie (and herself, she repeats, but won't remember) some food, because the nurse with the glasses who looked like that one comedian whose name she can't remember told her that Desmond would be fine without her right there and somehow, Penny believed her.

She pretends to not recognize him. Runs through him. He says her name and she tells him to fuck off.

When she returns to the hospital, her husband is gone, and there's a note on his pillow, in her father's handwriting, with an apology and an address.

Charlie says something but she's crying already and can't hear him.

—

Eleven days after she loses him again, her phone rings. She answers it, out of instinct.

It's Frank. Frank Lapidus.

Fuck.

"Give me the phone," says a voice she knows but can't place.

"Kate," says Frank, and oh my god. "I wanna-"  
"Maybe let him tell her?" says another voice, almost dripping with sarcasm.

"Miles, shut-"  
"I'm sorry," she says, shakes her head. "Are you- are you talking about Des?"

Kate responds.

"He's here with us. We're in Guam. Frank can probably give you an exact address."  
"Kate. Were you on the island?"  
"…Yeah. Yeah, we were."  
"Was… was he?"

God knows what happened to him there this time.

He gets to the phone in two minutes, apparently done with showering, and they talk. He doesn't say much about himself, but he does say something among the lines of "Did you know you had a brother? Because holy _shit F_ araday is my _IN-LAW_ ," half asleep and leaving out details. He asks about Charlie, mostly, and about her.

She smiles as she writes down the address.

—

It's a quieter reunion than last time. It has tears and a kiss, but it lacks the grandeur.

"Everyone else is inside."  
He holds her hand.

—

The man named James, who Desmond calls Sawyer, doesn't pick up that they're married for two weeks after they all temporarily settle into the safe house her father had left her an address for.

He laughs at the concept of Desmond being married, and doesn't say why.

It's because he's wild, she thinks. It's because James knows him only as unhinged.

She sees Claire, whose hair is barely there and who is shorter than she expected, who Desmond says he worries about constantly, in the corner, tense up at the sight of steam from the coffee pot.

—

"Hey," Kate says, soon after. "I didn't know who else to go to."

"I'm sorry?" she looks up from the last Harry Potter book _,_ which she's been meaning to read for a while. She would rather not be interrupted.

"Claire was. Alone. For three years. There."

Kate's sentence is fractured, not sure which words to use. Penny understands.  
"And?"  
"You've… dealt with helping someone with that problem before."

"Oh."

Kate shakes her head. "I promised her I'd help her."  
Penny blurts out her reasoning for helping Desmond, asking "Do you love her?" and she regrets it instantly.  
Kate is quieted by the question. Penny understands.

"Yes," she says, after a minute. "Not like you love Desmond, I don't think she-"  
Penny pauses, because Desmond has told her something he saw and that he might be getting times mixed up again. He's usually _so good_ with chronology.

"Sure," she eventually says, covering her tracks, this was totally intentional, asking a near stranger about love. "But you love her. So keep doing that. Ask questions if you can, I guess. Don't get upset or confused when she won't answer."

Kate rolls her eyes. "I don't even know what to ask."

Penny rolls her eyes, and hates herself for speaking.

—

Penny knows what Kate did.

She can't say she hasn't thought about doing the same. She knows she doesn't have murder in her, but she's thought of it. In a way, she's thankful Ben Linus did what she knows she couldn't, wouldn't be able to do.

The world is a better place with her father out of it.

Kate has a fake ID with the name _Catherine Jane Laurens_ on it, (she's Cat to her friends, Katie to her mother, Kate to the general public). Claire has one with _Claire Shepard_ on it. Sawyer has one with _James Wells_ on it. Frank's is _Max Weintraub,_ and Miles and Richard don't show her theirs.

Kate has so many reasons to hide, is the main thought Penny keeps getting back to. She doesn't know why she's drawn to the woman, who is nice, she supposes, but like everyone in her life, now, distant. Hardened.

She wants to be that, sometimes. She's tried to be distant and cold before. It didn't work.

It's not really a talent of hers.

—

When Penny was a kid, seeing her father was a treat. He was always so busy with work in America, her mother would say. (She knows it wasn't in America, now, but that's not what matters.)

Her father had a driver (who wasn't a driver, she knows now), whose name she forgets (but she'll remember soon enough). He would drive her to her father's office, and they would talk in Spanish, because Penny loved languages, and Spanish was the first she ever learned.

He was nice. When her father couldn't have her, the driver would babysit.

When Penny was seven, he let slip that her father's friend Ellie was pregnant with her baby brother. She thought about that a lot.

Back to the present.

Penny's little brother, who she had never met, was shot dead when he time travelled. And the fact that the part of the statement that was the easiest to understand is the "shot dead when he time travelled," at this point in her life, is a little discomforting.

And a man who looks just like how she remembers the driver is sitting across from her, sipping tea. Unchanged.

"Do you know my father, Richard?" she asks, so as to determine.

He smiles, a little bit. His eyes are so much older than the rest of him.

"Charles, you mean?" he says, it doesn't sound like a question.  
"Yes," she prompts him on. "I remember you, I think?"

"You were a good kid," says Richard.

"You were a good babysitter," says Penny. "How?"  
He shakes his hand, noncommittal, "Island."

"Of course."

She has a lot of questions, but she won't ask them right now. They laugh at the connection for a while, and then Miles comes in and Richard loses his composure for a minute.

She thinks, this is an alright way to live.

—

And so life goes on, as life does. Kate and Claire get an apartment near the one Penny has decided to buy in Los Angeles. Claire needs more than just Kate, for familiarity's sake, and both Penny and Desmond see no point in running anymore, now that Penny's father is gone. Desmond. James says he's going to Florida, and Miles and Richard insist upon following him (and Miles and Richard sure do seem close). Frank flies back to New York, says he's going to try and start fresh. Maybe (definitely, he corrects, but without certainty) go back to flight school, get re-certified. He says, "Hope to never see any of you again," and then whispers "Keep in touch, kid," to Penny.

Claire and Kate are delightful to be around, and when Desmond brings up that they want to get their son back. a friend for Charlie, he jokes. Charlie has latched onto Claire, which everyone finds hilarious (except Penny, who doesn't get it, who won't get anything, and thank god for that.)

Claire's mother has been in a shady motel in the city for three weeks. Desmond goes with Kate and Claire as moral support. Penny doesn't go. It's not her place, she thinks. She gives them the money to pay off Claire's mother's motel stay, and says to come back safe.

She worries the whole seven hours they're gone, They come back with a blonde woman, maybe 10 years older than Penny, who is crying, and a toddler.

Claire's mother, while overbearing and paranoid about her daughter's safety, is good enough to live near, and doesn't complain much. She's refuses to acknowledge that Kate and Desmond and Penny might be telling the truth of the situation, and barely believes her own daughter. She leaves after two weeks, tells Claire to visit soon, glares at Kate.

Claire, meanwhile, is shaky with Aaron. Afraid of hurting him. Kate tries not to butt in too much, afraid that Aaron will never see Claire as his mother. And Aaron clearly adores both of them. Penny doesn't know how to intervene, or if she even should.

She resigns herself to standing by and hoping for the best.

She smiles. Despite everything, they are going to be fine.

—

They are, mostly.


End file.
